Helpful hints and friendly notes from the world-acclaimed photography instructors at BetterPhoto.com

April 19, 2013

Processing an Image: Taking the Edge Off

We all can tend to push an image too much during processing, especially when adding contrast, structure, or in HDR-land. Over-processing delicate natural images is pretty much always a disaster.

Too much contrast can have the appearance of over sharpening. Too much structure can add an over-sharpening effect especially where there are edges against a bald sky. And over cooked HDR can be flat, for example, if we remove too much contrast and /or shadow areas during HDR tone mapping.

(c) Tony Sweet

Rather than reprocessing the image from scratch (if it isn’t too far gone), I find that adding about 66% opacity of glamour glow from Nik’s Color Efex 4, can soften the image and render a more “fine art” look. After applying the filter globally, I’ll use the negative control points to fine tune areas that may become too dark. This process was done to the image above.

(c) Tony Sweet

Digital Infrared can have a similar problem. See image above. Aside from using glamour glow, for infrared, I’ll tend to work in Magic Bullet Photo Looks (Red Giant Software), Diffusion and Light, presets, adjusting to taste. This is a high-end software primarily developed for video, but adapted to still photography. They have an entire line of software for still photography.

The glow was added using and fine tuning the Basic Black Diffusion preset in the Diffusion and Light filters in Magic Bullet Photo Looks.

Glamour Glow, Silver Efex Pro, and Viveza from Nik, are used on these images.